1. Human readability by domain experts as
well as software specialist, is a requirement for XML
documents.

Yes true, but if we were to adopt a 'code' as a tag
then it would still be human readable i.e it is ASCII but the
meaning would be obscured to the casual/uneducated reader. It is not
beyond the wit of comptuing to look up the 'code' and make it
friendly to the casual reader. Also, given the human reader
could have some language other than English as his/her
mother tongue, then the look up could be keyed on Language Code
+ tag code. Is this even better than having a long English
tag?

Even with 'long' tag names, which allow readability in
English, there still remains a problem, in that the tag does not
convey the completemeaning - otherwise we would not need any
semantics at all.

Again we must ask a similar question to the one
which I posed before.

How much of the semantics should be in the
tag and how much in the actual semantic description of the
element.